Stories

Civic Science Fellow Karen Andrade’s journey from community science to the White House to global philanthropy

In 2007, a few days into her new job as a toxics reduction specialist with San Francisco’s Department of Environment, Karen Andrade walked into what she expected would be a dry bureaucratic event: a public hearing on pesticide regulation.

Instead, she found a regal ballroom packed with people. State regulators sat stoically at the front, far from the crowd, staring down at their notepads. Then a young mother approached the microphone.

Through a translator, she explained she was the mother of a boy with neurodevelopmental delays. Throughout her pregnancy, working in and living close to agricultural fields, she’d been exposed to pesticides. Often without warning, she would hear a plane nearby and feel drops of pesticide landing on her skin as she worked in the fields. 

“She reminded me of the women of the neighborhood I had grown up in in Mexico City,” Andrade recalls. “Her posture, the cadence of her voice—it was all familiar.”

After the mother’s moving testimony, a scientist, brought to the meeting by community organizations, spoke in support of her story. “I almost physically felt the click of insight,” Andrade says. “I saw the scientific enterprise being accountable to the communities that surround and sustain it. And I knew I had found a path.”

That path would lead her from local, community-based research all the way to the White House, driven by one fundamental question: Who gets to ask the research questions?

Questions from the community

While working toward her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, Andrade came to a realization. “Whole research programs—millions of dollars and hundreds of people—are mobilized to answer the questions of a few professors,” she says. “But I knew they were not the only ones with questions worth answering, or wisdom worth elevating.” 

She was studying environmental microbes in the lab that helped discover CRISPR sequences—one of science’s most elite spaces. But she kept thinking about communities like the one she grew up in, communities where people struggled to be heard “because they couldn’t hire a scientist or statistician who could amplify their voice.”

Her response was to create the UC Berkeley Science Shop in 2013. Science shops are organizations where community questions drive academic research, a model that is more common in Europe. Instead of professors setting the research agenda, communities bring their questions to the shop, and students conduct research to answer them.

For example, the Salmon Creek Watershed Council needed historical maps of their land to understand the changes in water use patterns that were affecting salmon populations. The maps existed in UC Berkeley’s library, but the community, living hours away, had no easy way to access them. “They wanted to understand why the salmon disappeared, but also to contribute whatever they could to maintaining the waterways,” Andrade says.

Through the Science Shop, an undergraduate student retrieved the maps, analyzed land use changes over two centuries, and presented findings at a community meeting. The project gave residents the data, and the power, to advocate for their watershed. Yet despite clear community need and student enthusiasm, Andrade wasn’t able to get formal recognition of the Science Shop from the university. “There was zero traction around the administration,” she says. 

The failure sparked a deeper investigation: What made the U.S. academic ecosystem one in which it was so hard to institutionalize this model of community-driven science?

Stories of civic science 

By 2020, Andrade had spent years navigating hostile academic terrain. “I would say in hushed tones, ‘I’m really interested in the intersections of science and society,’” she says. “In academia, those were almost dirty words. But I didn’t want to just be a traditional scientist.”

The isolation was crushing. Despite a Berkeley Ph.D. and postdocs at prestigious institutions, when Andrade walked into meetings, “people would hand me their dishes.’” They assumed that since she was a Mexican woman in an academic space, she must be support staff. 

Then she discovered the Civic Science Fellowship opportunity at the Science Philanthropy Alliance. “I was really curious about the role of philanthropy in both maintaining and shifting scientific structures,” she says.

The Fellowship was her opportunity to investigate the questions that had been unwelcome in academia. Her project examined why funders give to science, and whether supporting research differs from other areas of philanthropy. “Ultimately, giving often starts with emotion,” even for analytical scientific funders, Andrade says.

At the same time, she began exploring similar questions with some of the other Fellows in her cohort, finding in each other different but complementary visions of science. Sam Dyson saw science as an outlet for human curiosity. Andrade saw it as a way for people to access democracy. For Shannon Dosemagen, science was a system of gatekeeping that needed to be dismantled and rebuilt from the community up. 

To try to capture this multiplicity, the trio created Civic Science Stories, conducting over 50 conversations across the civic science community. “We wanted to bring people from all of our networks and say, ‘Let’s talk about science, let’s talk about how you’ve experienced it,’” Andrade says. The resulting publication featured 25 narratives examining how “science is experienced and lived through in many different ways.”

From local to global impact

At a gathering of the Fellows, Andrade met Alondra Nelson who had recently been announced as deputy director of science and society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In March 2022, she joined OSTP as a senior policy advisor and STEM Next Opportunity Fellow.

“There’s no way I would have made it to the White House without the Civic Science Fellowship,” Andrade says. “There’s no question in my mind.”

When President Biden signed an executive order on environmental justice, she led the creation of the federal subcommittee that the executive order called for. “It was such a big honor.” She also started OSTP’s Interagency Working Group on environmental justice, connecting agencies that rarely communicated about their overlapping work, with the goal of aligning each agency’s scientific work with administration priorities.

One project she’s particularly proud of was helping to create a comprehensive report on how federal agencies use community engagement in research. “We surveyed all federal agencies about prize competitions, challenges, crowdsourcing, and citizen science,” she says. The report documented the breadth of community-engaged federal research while providing a framework for agencies to expand such work.

After two years in federal service, Andrade moved to TED Conferences, where she now serves as director of portfolio impact for climate and breakthrough science organizations. Her work is part of The Audacious Project, which helps nonprofits secure the major funding they need to expand successful programs worldwide.

Throughout her journey from science shop to White House to global philanthropy Andrade has been trying to understand “why the U.S. scientific ecosystem doesn’t make space for community-driven science. And then searching for the power to change the ecosystem.”

At TED she brings her history and understanding to organizations around the world, each partnership an opportunity to answer the question that has driven her from the beginning: Who gets to ask the questions, and how can we ensure more voices are heard?

Karen is a member of the 2020-21 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her fellowship was supported by the Rita Allen Foundation.